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Are Plain-Text Ads Doomed?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the the-end-of-another-advertising-world dept.

friedegg writes "Usability expert Jakob Nielsen's latest alertbox examines the future of text advertising on the web. Text based advertising has become increasingly popular recently partly because of Google's success with it. Nielsen notes that advertising works well on search engines because users visit them with the specific intent of going elsewhere. He also thinks it's only a matter of time before the novelty of text advertising wears off, and users develop "box blindness" in addition to their current "banner blindness." It isn't totally negative, though, as he thinks the low-end media format forces advertises to express a focused and succinct message that users may take more seriously."

6 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. In a word: NO by Blaine+Hilton · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I do not see text ads as being "doomed". Like anything they have their place in the world. On WebCalc I sell text-based ads and the advertisers seem to like them. I like them because they look much better then banners and are faster to load. However when you look at them they do not grab your attention as much as the traditional graphic ads do. This sounds bad, but I think it is really a benefit because it provides you with a smaller quantity of visitors, but those visitors are of a higher level of quality.

    Many times with newer rich media ads people are trying to close them when in reality they click through. This upsets the user who would probably close the site right away. Using such distracting ads such as rich media that goes over the whole site (think Yahoo and Weather.com) and pop-ups alienate your website visitors.

    As for targeting, search engines are not the only application for targeting. All websites can implement targeting. If I have a site that's geared for collage students then the best ad would be for somebody targeting that demographic, it doesn't matter what form of advertising it is. This statement is very much like comparing apples and oranges.

    Go calculate something

  2. Better have them plaintext by thespare · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's way better to have afs plaintext. Personally, I never click on huge flickering banners. First of all because they are *so* annoying, and second because 9 out of 10 times; if you click 1, you'll get a thousand popups after that trying to have you visit Bukakke-specials or Preteen teens or whatever 31337 pr0n those stupid websites have.

    Can't we just ban them? :-)

    A.

    --
    http://www.spareprojects.nl
  3. diamonds != forever. advertising == forever by Hubert_Shrump · · Score: 5, Funny

    As fonts get smaller, ASCII art in the adverts will pick up and pretty soon - we'll be back where we started.

    Just a matter of time.

    --
    Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
  4. My Experience by waldoj · · Score: 5, Insightful

    On one of my websites, we switched to book-your-own text ads a few months ago. For the first month, the clickthru rates were astounding -- 5%-15% on some of them. Now, we're lucky to break 1%. The reason, of course, is obvious: they were new and interesting, and people noticed them because of that. Now, they are neither new nor interesting. They remain an amusing thing on the site, but they're not paying the bills, I'm afraid. All that we can do from here is continue to switch it up: move them around on the site, offer formats with bigger text, more words, etc. But that's not a solution, just a stall tactic.

    -Waldo Jaquith

  5. Format doesn't matter, targetting does by phorm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Plain text banner-style ads might not do as well, especially long ones... but truly I appreciate them more than the annoying flash-type versions. Also, they show up much better than GIF's on links/lynx

    An, as mentioned, effective short ads are very effective. For instance, when you're searching for "Digital Camera", and you get an immediate link on google to thinks like "prices on digital cameras on ebay/amazon" are still good forms of advertising. Not only are these ads short and sweet, but they're often actually relevant to what you're looking for, which flashy annoying banner-ads often are not.

    I think it's not really a matter of getting ads that are flashy graphics or plain text-based, but more a matter of getting ads that are relevent (for graphic based, thinkgeek.com ads and many others on slashdot would be nicely targetted), In fact, when you think about it, there is a lot of advertising on slashdot, but most is relevant or from interested parties.

  6. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion